so, they signed the tpp.

i would have rather seen a bilateral deal with japan...

why didn't they sign it previously? well, you'd think it probably had something to do with wanting to wait to see what was happening in the united states. a canadian entrance into the tpp could have severely complicated nafta talks.

and, the timing of signing on to the deal is no doubt informed by recent events around the nafta negotiation. that may seem ominous, but i think you can also read it the other way - the liberals may have calculated that trump will not be able to re-open nafta in the face of congressional opposition by 2024, and that these talks will rather go on until trump leaves or is removed from the white house. they may also have calculated that the united states will return to the tpp in 2022 or 2026.

the standard narrative is going to be that it's a pre-emptive reaction to the imminent collapse of nafta, but the facts would hardly uphold it. two-way trade is really only going to exist with japan and perhaps australia; the rest of the countries are going to act as...

trump thinks that the tpp is a backdoor for china. it's crazy. the tpp is the exact opposite: it's the reconstruction of the wartime japanese empire, to act as a counter-balance to contain the chinese with. so, the bulk of these countries exist in the deal to provide natural resources and labour to japanese multinationals, who will then sell the products in north america - or at least in canada. the labour provisions in the agreement are a joke, really.

then, you've got singapore for money laundering and other banking functions.

how is that going to replace nafta? the japanese market for beef is not that powerful, although the alberta farming lobby no doubt pushed hard for the deal.

it makes more sense to think that canada has made the choice to act independently of trump, for the reason that it doesn't have much faith in trump to chart a path, and rather has better reason to think the future will be designed by his opponents.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i don't see any value in this liberal strategy to try and deflect from trudeau's privileged class status, not because it isn't in some sense a liability - and it should be stressed that this is an about-face from the glossy magazine photos that i criticized - but because it isn't believable.

everybody knows that justin trudeau is an aristocrat. so, attempts to deflect from or distort this seem like an attempt to construct a parallel reality, which i guess is only really an error insofar as it is so transparently fraudulent. they're just replacing one unbelievable narrative with another.

campaign rhetoric aside, no sane person thought justin trudeau was going to be a representative of the middle class, and that's not why he got elected. he was elected on a social liberalization platform, which was a bundle of ideas that included the right to wear scarves in public and the right to smoke up without going to jail. there was maybe some hope that he might bring in people that would help ensure our descendants have the right to live on a habitable planet, but these are the kinds of decisions that are made by corporate aristocrats, and the hope that he might have some influence was actually reliant on him using that elite status for influence.

i guess the cynical analysis is that the narrative shift is meant to accompany a policy shift that will align the liberals to the center-right, which is where they have tended to stabilize towards during long periods of safe governance, and where they've largely sat since coming back into office. they've tended to avoid this kind of messaging, but the recent absorption of the aging progressive conservative intelligentsia may be leading them to project phantom demographics into the future. that swing vote won't be replaced, when it dies, and it's almost dead; instead, you'll have a fundamental shift in the number of voters that call themselves 'liberals', because they always have been - and whether this is a 5% or 10% tipping point will determine if the conservative party is a viable vehicle moving into the future, and whether the ndp is a perpetual opposition party or not, as these no longer young voters have now overwritten their parents' conservative identity with their own liberal identity, and are consequently reachable from the left. the fact that the ndp is currently a distraction, at best, doesn't affect the demographics that are emerging.

in canada, that means a shift from a left that takes up 60-65% of the spectrum to a left that takes up 65-75% of it.

but, this is what happens to all liberal governments - they get some support from pragmatic conservatives at the beginning of their mandate, and then design their policies to try and appeal to conservative voters, then get confused when they crater on both sides, as those pragmatic conservatives still always prefer the conservatives, in the end.

if it were up to me, i would not be having trudeau making apologies for his status. i'd be having him demonstrate results to the cameras.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the reasons trump is doing this don't have anything to do with workers; one might rather note trump's treatment of south korea as a chinese satellite with a level of alarm. but, it could very well provide incentives for korean and chinese businesses to manufacture more goods in the united states, which would indeed import some jobs from elsewhere into the united states. but, at what retaliatory cost is unclear.

i don't have any particular aversion to tariffs in principle, it's more that using them is a really tricky game that requires quite a bit of mathematical analysis and intelligent foresight - qualities the president does not have. tariffs should certainly not be used haphazardly as a hegemonic tool of control, but that box is already long open.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42784380